


Memento Requiem

by mrsskeptic



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Cancer, Cancer Arc, Cancer Arc (X-Files), Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, God I hate tags, Guilt, Sleeping Together, Tattoos, msr saves the day as always, tbh this fic was a saving grace during a really tough week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-29 17:44:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20800445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrsskeptic/pseuds/mrsskeptic
Summary: Memento Requiem. Translation: "Remember to Rest".A cancer-arc fic where Mulder finally catches the sleep he deserves with his one and only g-woman.





	Memento Requiem

The early morning sun bleeds through the blinds of the hospital room, casting a golden glow against the back of Mulder’s head and over Scully’s sleeping form. The space is hushed save for the sound of her soft snores and the monitor hooked up to her, its pings ringing off the walls. It’s both a comfort and a nuisance to hear; a reminder that she’s still alive... 

And another that she’s withering away before him.

Mulder watches the slope of her waist rise and fall with each passing breath. This was an old habit of his ever since her abduction. In the first few days after she’d been brought back, it was as if the air had possessed her. The machines did the work for her, raising her chest robotically, a bag at the end of a vacuum. He hadn’t been able to watch then. It was when they’d taken her off support and he’d found himself by her side again that he caught himself staring at her thin body, hypnotized by the battle she unconsciously fought. 

Now? Scully breathes on her own, but a deadlier threat looms over her. A deadlier threat that, by his own beaten path he dragged her along on, had caused the sickness that was blooming in her to spread like weeds, thick and overgrown. It’s a thought that makes his stomach turn, a record-flip-and-scratch to play over and over and over again like a bad song out of key. His guilt is so palpable he thinks he could hold it in his hands if he wanted to.

But he doesn’t.

So he focuses on her breaths.

He’s so fixed on her frame that he doesn’t even notice when she opens her eyes, her voice as smooth as a current when she mumbles half-awake, “...Mulder. Hi. What — what time is it?”

He blinks a few times at her question, momentarily confused as he falls back into his body. All of a sudden he sucks in through his teeth and shakes his head like an eight-ball as if to clear it of it’s glaringly obvious answer: _ THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT! _“...Uh, a little after seven. Y’ sleep alright?” 

“Yeah, yeah I slept just fine.” She answers after a brief moment of staring at him, making a little sigh as she rolls over to her other side. “Might sleep a little more, actually. Have you been here all night?”

“Well, you were passed out when I got here.” A deflection if there ever was any. An indirect way of saying, _ how could I ever leave? _He doesn’t mention how he’d used his badge to get past the hesitant nurses pressing him about visitation hours, or how he’d spent the night before combing through X-File after X-File in search of a cure. Instead he lets the quiet rise around them until it sits like fog on a horizon, all the things unsaid making a bed of his tongue.

A splash of color enters his focus, and he finds its home in the ink etched into Scully’s back.

_ Her tattoo_.

He’s glad she hadn’t seen the look on his face when he’d found out she’d gotten one. Getting a little ink in a shady parlor in Philly was so unlike her, was such an _ un-Scully _ thing to do that when Skinner had told him she had to be tested for ergot poisoning because of it, Mulder had laughed in his face. 

_ “What? _Scully_? A _ tattoo_? You sure it wasn’t her evil twin?” _

_ The assistant director had given him a look so striking it rattled him to his core. “Maybe you don’t know her as well as you thought.” _

Now it was staring at him with blinding opposition, peeking out from the edges of her hospital gown. It was full of vibrant reds and greens as far as he could see, as if an artist had snuck in when Mulder wasn’t looking and painted his own Picasso into her back. It looked to be a circle of some kind, a pattern weaving in and out of itself, etched right in the dip of her spine. And he thinks he could make out what exactly it is if he could just...

“Mulder, what are you —”

“Your tattoo.” He says, tracing his fingertip in circles around the imprint, shifting the gown out of the way. An ouroboros. An infinity. _ Head to tail, head to tail_. “I like it.”

Goosebumps sprout under his path, the pale map of her skin wracked with a sudden chill that left her with no choice but to shiver; his heart hammers against his chest in return. There was always something exciting about this -- about _ touching Scully _ \-- that he’d both never get enough of and could never pin a name to. As if the very act of his skin on hers spun a thousand words between them, all-electrifying, all-hot, all-consuming. He finds he wants to put both of his hands on her. And his mouth. And him. And him. **And him**.

But he doesn’t voice this.

Instead, he just lets his finger wander around the pattern another time. Slowly. Thoughtfully.

“Thank you.” She replies -- almost _ coyly_, he notes (and then notes how annoying noting that is) -- before her body takes on a sudden stillness. Mulder wonders briefly if he’s crossed a boundary. But then she relaxes into his touch, and he remembers that they’ve never had any. “It’s strange,” she continues, “I almost forget it’s there. Sometimes I wonder if the tumor had any part in me getting it. Given its location, I wouldn’t be surprised if my impulse control wasn’t as, uh... _ Sound _ as it usually is.”

“Yeah? And good ol’ Ed, was that the tumor, too?” He means it as a joke, but halfway through he realizes it isn’t funny, and the tail end of it curves down into bitterness before he can stop himself. The guilt sits on him like a rock the minute it’s out of his mouth. (And he already has so many things to feel guilty for.) Scully steels under his touch in response, shifting on her back so he has no choice but to let his hand fall to his lap. “_ No_. Ed, he -- That was my own decision.”

They sit in silence like that for a few minutes; Mulder with his hand on his bouncing knee, Scully with her face turned up towards the ceiling. He feels all of a sudden like a kid at the prom, like his senior year when he ditched Stacy Weathers (who had always had a crush on him, he never knew why) on the dancefloor to kick back the beers his friend Mark had brought out of the trunk of his car. He had seen her later that night crying into her friend’s shoulder. It’s that same shame, that same embarrassment that wears on him now, like an old coat three sizes too big. But finally Scully lets out a sigh that tears the tension in two, her fingers splaying out across the bedsheet as she peers over at him. As always, she brings him back to reality. “Have you gotten any sleep since you’ve been here?”

“Yeah, a little.” He lies, and then when he sees he doesn’t fool her, he adds, “Don’t underestimate the comfort of a rickety hospital chair, Scully. Actually, when I was a kid, my mom used to make fun of me. I could fall asleep anywhere. Park benches, school bus, you name it. Then everything with Samantha… I don’t know, I guess it just knocked the habit right outta me.” Now he’s lucky if he gets any sleep at all. Now he’s lucky if the thought of Scully,_ Scully dying Scully dead Scully cold _ doesn’t invade even his waking thoughts. Mulder glances up to meet her gaze and he’s caught by a sudden anxiety that washes over him in waves. Not because he’s humiliated by what he’s shared (God knows she’s seen far worse of him) but because her wide blue eyes hold some secret in them, something he didn’t want to put on her, especially now; a sense of sadness that tugs at his heart and doesn’t let go. He parts his lips to say something, _ anything _ to get that look off her face, but his thoughts fly out from under him and he’s left mouthing the ghost of them.

“Come here.” She interrupts, scooting over to the other side of the bed, patting the spot where she had just been laying. It’s so sudden, so plainly spoken that it catches him off-guard. A grumble of resistance snatches out of Mulder’s throat as he gives a small shake of his head, but Scully’s voice remains firm. “No, I’m serious -- There’s plenty of room here. If not for your sake, then for mine.”

Knowing he can hardly say no to her he reluctantly stands, throwing the jacket he’d had in his lap on the back of the chair. He shifts on his feet awkwardly for a moment before taking off his shoes, kicking them aside. It’s when he raises a knee onto the bed that he stops all of a sudden, as if just now the notion strikes him as odd. He towers over her, waiting for the _ wait _ in her voice. “You don’t have to do this, Scully.”  
She arches a brow in question at him. “Shut up, Mulder.”

He laughs a good, genuine laugh for the first time in weeks.

Finding a comfortable spot proves difficult at first. His feet hang off the end of the frame until he manages to scoot back, but he’s aware he’s taking up too much space. It takes a few times adjusting to get him settled, and then it’s Scully’s turn wondering where to go. They touch each other without the electricity of before, with all the fumbling of two teens holding hands for the first time. _ Stacy Weathers would get a kick out of this _ , he thinks, and it makes a smile bloom across his cheeks. It doesn’t go unnoticed.  
“What? What are you laughing at?” Scully asks, brushing a copper lock back from her face as she unsuccessfully leans against the bed. He lets the chuckle fall out of his mouth.

“Prom, senior year.”  
And somehow, she gets it. 

He finally has to say, “I don’t bite, y’ know” after almost five minutes of shuffling before she presses her body close to his, and that’s when the room suddenly grows ten degrees. Her stomach leans into his waist, her arm hovering awkwardly above his torso until she finally gives in and drapes it across him. Like it’s second nature Mulder wraps his arm around her, coming to rest his hand on the small of her back where it had been not even ten minutes before. He feels her jaw against his shoulder, feels her breath on his neck, and a sudden pain surprises him as it wrenches against his ribcage. 

It’s in this moment he realizes that, without a single doubt in his mind, he would trade anything -- even the truth -- to hold her like this again.

“I always knew you were trying to seduce me.” He jokes even though his voice shakes as he says it, and her laughter rings like a bell in his ear. 

* * *

Dana knows he’s fallen asleep by the tension that releases in his shoulders. One minute he’s wound up so tight it’s as if a string was pulled taut from the top of his head; the next he slumps into the bed with an unceremonious sigh, his breaths drawn out and even. She moves her head carefully -- skillfully, like a cat on a shelf -- to press the shell of her ear to his chest, listening to the comforting rhythm of his heart beat: _ I’m-here, I’m-here, I’m-here_.

This was an old habit of hers ever since they’d found him in the Arctic, when he’d clung onto his life by loose threads against the retrovirus. She’d sat by his side with books, with magazines, with her hope heavy in her hands. The constant jump of the heart monitor reminded her he’d survived -- that he was still fighting, above all odds, as always -- and that solace never stopped even after he woke up. When the rare silence between them called for it, when the _ moment _ called for it, she searched out for that familiar sound. For the ever-presence that she, too, had something worth fighting for. _ Someone _ who fought for her. _ I’m-here. I’m-here. I’m-here_. 

_I’m here, too, Mulder_, she thinks as she closes her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> that tattoo touching was the most erotic thing i've ever written and i've written actual smut before
> 
> i was only able to write this as het as it is because i too lust after miss gillian anderson
> 
> the fact that i've written TWO fics is honestly a cause for celebration! go team!


End file.
